The Ultimate Guide to Automated Enterprise Email Processing
August 29, 2019
About 124.5 billion business emails are sent and received each day, and this number is only growing (DMR). Manual email triaging, the primary mode of email intake up until recently, is not scalable for such growth. Employees, on average, receive 121 emails per day (DMR). Spending approximately 3 minutes per email would result in 6 hours of labor just combing through emails. Moreover, employees whose jobs are dependent upon checking email (i.e. IT, helpdesk, customer service, etc.) receive mountains upon mountains of emails exceeding that of an average employee.
The crazy thing about this is that complex and time-sensitive emails to bulk email inboxes which necessitate diligent supervision and follow-through get muddled up with routine requests for address changes or password resets. This is why it’s paramount that enterprises begin automating their email intake with process automation.
Automating these processes frees up employees allowing them to hone in on other tasks which require their detailed attention and utilizes important human skills such as context, cognition, empathy, and sentiment.
Prior to digitization, a large life insurer we work with, had email queue times of 15 hours, all front-ended by a team of intake agents.
For this insurer, it took approximately 17 full-time employees to:
With SmartMail implementation, their emails are classified in just a few seconds. Furthermore, their triaging process before SmartMail was limited to the 8-9 working hours. Due to SmartMail’s unsupervised functionality, their email classification is now a 24/7 process.
At Ushur, use cases can be deployed quickly. The process begins when our customers specify their pain points, and define the areas where they are receiving the most repetitive emails and tasks that could be automated. After deciding on the use case, the Ushur team creates a custom demo to showcase how the Ushur platform can be used for the specific needs of the customer. Then, a proof of concept (POC) process begins.
For the POC, we take a sample of historical emails and strip away PII information using an anonymizer tool. This sample set acts as training data to augment to Ushur’s existing machine learning data. Our quick and efficient POC process is a limited scope deployment, and it takes about one to two months to complete. With the KPIs and goals in mind, the POC is tailored to meet the needs and expectations of the customer. During the POC process, customers go through training so that they can adopt the knowledge and skills to ensure the SmartMail technology runs smoothly post-deployment. After this process is completed, both the customer and Ushur analyze ROI and KPIs to verify all intended goals were met.
The process is simple. Emails flood the company’s inbox. Ushur’s technology uses AI, ML, and OCR and ICR to read email body and attachments. Then, the emails are either a) classified and routed to the appropriate destination (person or department) or b) classified with intent clearly identified to kickstart an automated Ushur workflow to accomplish a certain task (i.e. change of address, claim initiation, tax ID modification). Not only does Ushur’s technology have the propensity to automate email triaging, but the SmartMail technology can also reduce the manual labor needed to perform simple, repetitive tasks.
Email Intake Automation is a “must-have”
The best part about automating email intake processing is how flexible and customizable automation can be to your company’s specific needs. From Helpdesk automation which enables automatic resolutions, to new user/password reset, to address changes, the options for email triage automation are endless (helpsystems).
Interested in reading about how one of our customers, a large life insurance provider, implemented SmartMail for their email automation needs? Download the whitepaper below.
